FROM hoardings plastered all over Guatemala, the stern face of Otto Pérez Molina stares out beside the clenched-fist logo of his Patriot Party. General Pérez, as he was known until hanging up his rifle in 2000, was once the Guatemalan army’s intelligence director. After coming second in the 2007 presidential race, he is the front-runner in this year’s election on September 11th. Should he win, he will be the first military man to become president since army rule ended in 1986. He promises to crush crime with a mano dura, or iron fist, by extending sentences, hiring 10,000 police, expanding video surveillance and lowering the age of criminal responsibility.

Polls show that many voters cannot wait for Mr Pérez to attack criminals. With a murder rate of over 40 per 100,000 people, Guatemala is among the world’s most dangerous countries. Mexican drug mafias use the wild north as a base for storing merchandise and training hitmen. Youth gangs terrorise many areas of the capital. Prosecutions are rare; when they do happen, the villain is often a policeman.

But the return to power of a former general raises the spectre of a nightmare far worse than today’s violence: the mass murders of Guatemala’s 1960-96 civil war, in which an estimated 200,000 people died. Anyone who served in the army then “cannot be innocent of the atrocities that happened,” says Fernando Girón of the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human-rights group named for one of the conflict’s victims. Memories of the horrors are still fresh. Last month four former soldiers were each sentenced to 6,060 years in jail for massacring over 200 villagers in 1982. Many were killed with sledgehammers and then thrown down a well.

As Mr Pérez’s star has risen, his rivals have tried to link him to the war’s atrocities. He did lead troops in the Quiché region, which saw heavy civilian casualties. But nobody has turned up specific evidence of wrongdoing. In March Jennifer Harbury, the American widow of a Guatemalan rebel who disappeared while fighting the army in 1992, accused Mr Pérez (among others) of involvement in her husband’s alleged torture and murder. But the accusation has not stuck. Mr Pérez’s supporters note that he represented the army during peace negotiations in 1996, which greatly weakened it.

Either way, mano dura policies have a questionable record. El Salvador’s frequent experiments with repressive policing have not reduced crime, and Mexico’s murder rate has almost doubled since it began cracking down on drug gangs. In contrast, Central America’s lowest murder rates are found in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, which have opted for preventive, community-based policing. Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s popular attorney-general, says pointedly that she has taken down kingpins using “surgical investigation…without a shot fired.” Mr Pérez could easily decide to sack Ms Paz y Paz, whose background is in prosecuting human-rights abusers, including former soldiers.

Should he win, Mr Pérez’s iron fists will be tied by Guatemala’s lack of resources. The army has shrunk by two-thirds since 1996. There is a shortage of detectives (Ms Paz y Paz would like three times as many as she has) and a surplus of prisoners (jails are operating at 160% of capacity). The incumbent president, Álvaro Colom, has further strained the public finances by funding welfare programmes run by the former first lady, Sandra Torres. Those schemes have made 1m families better off, but have also drained the budgets of key ministries, including health and education. Guatemala’s roads are said to be in their worst condition in 20 years. Half of children under five are malnourished, one of the worst rates in the world. Mr Pérez has said he will maintain welfare spending and wants to launch an anti-hunger initiative. That will leave little money for a security build-up.

Paying for one would require higher tax revenues, which at 11% of GDP are among Latin America’s lowest. Mr Pérez says he will raise them to 14% via a “frontal assault” on evasion and smuggling. That will not be enough. After the election, Mr Pérez will have to consider increasing rates. For decades powerful businessmen have blocked such efforts. However, the middle-class army man is no stooge for the private sector, which bet on Harold Caballeros, a Harvard-educated evangelical Christian whose campaign has faltered. Businessmen are now courting Mr Pérez. But his rumoured choice for finance minister, Pavel Centeno, is a technocrat without strong links to companies.

Mr Pérez faces few strong rivals. Last month the Constitutional Court disqualified Ms Torres, his main opponent, from the race, finding that her recent divorce from Mr Colom did not exempt her from a ban on the president’s relatives running for office. With ten candidates standing, Mr Pérez may have trouble winning the majority needed to avoid a run-off. But he is heavily favoured to win a second round in November, and his party is expected to control nearly half of Congress.

Even though the outcome looks like a fait accompli, the campaign has been ugly. So far at least 35 activists or candidates for public office have been murdered. On August 31st the electoral authority said that the Patriot Party had already exceeded the $6.2m spending limit; its two closest rivals were not far behind. The penalty is a $125 fine, which even the president of the electoral tribunal, María Eugenia Villagrán, admits is “laughable”. Worse still, nobody knows the source of the money. Legitimate Guatemalan businesses are unlikely to have donated such sums, reinforcing suspicions about drug money in politics. Guatemalans can only guess who has paid for the election posters lining their streets.